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Removed as moderator of /r/Celebrities after over 14 years

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Re: Removed as moderator of /r/Celebrities after over 14 years

#2

Post by graeme »

Subreddit was shut down while mod team worked on an anti-CSAM bot to help moderate after reddit announced the shutdown of existing tools.

Imagine there’s a bit more to the story: tools only shut down June 30th. But still notable. Shutdown obviously hurting Reddit still if they’re resorting to such measures and taking such risks.

Re: Removed as moderator of /r/Celebrities after over 14 years

#5

Post by leoedin »

It's interesting seeing this situation play out across different subreddits. There seems to be 2 kinds of subreddits - the "category" kind (simple, descriptive name) and the "community" kind (have a defined purpose, could exist under a whole range of names)

The moderators of all of them see themselves as somehow owning the community, but I think that's less clear to the users. To most users, r/Celebrities is a category of posts about celebrities. They don't really care who moderates it. It's a similar situation for things like region/city specific subreddits. The users don't really care about the culture, they just want someone to delete the spam. When the moderators start shutting it down, or threatening to move the community elsewhere, the users mostly end up thinking "who elected you anyway?"

The community subreddits are different - they often have a much more defined culture and purpose. Those are the ones which, if the moderators give up, will die. It seems like Reddit is betting that most subreddits are the category kind - and they're probably right. But the community subreddits are likely to be lost.

Re: Removed as moderator of /r/Celebrities after over 14 years

#10

Post by veave »

leoedin wrote: post #5

It's interesting seeing this situation play out across different subreddits. There seems to be 2 kinds of subreddits - the "category" kind (simple, descriptive name) and the "community" kind (have a defined purpose, could exist under a whole range of names) The moderators of all of them see themselves as somehow owning the community, but I think that's less clear to the users. To most users, r/Celebrities is a catego…

>The community subreddits are different - they often have a much more defined culture and purpose. Those are the ones which, if the moderators give up, will die.

I am in some "community" subreddits and moderators are just there to enforce the rules that they made up and not everybody necessarily agree with. As an example, it's very common to have vague rules that silence some flavour of on-topic conversations... and then they are arbitrarily enforced, depending on whether the mod likes or dislikes where the conversation is going.

In my opinion, if mods from small subs were gone, that would be a huge positive. I'm glad that this abusive relationship of mods who think they own the entire community (including the users) and treat it as their fiefdom is coming to an end. Just the fact that they are shutting down entire communities shows the level of entitlement they have over the community they moderate. Doing a lot of unpaid labour doesn't entitle you to anything, but it does indeed show the kind of person that you are.

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